MORE BRICK

I mentioned in the last post that I expected the masonry work to be a long process, but I don't think I fully understood just how long.  We're about 8 weeks in now, and still going.  But you'll see from the photos below that this is not your average straightforward brick job.  This first image is one of the compound cuts they had to create to work around our column bases...

Steven's masterpiece.  Each pair of columns had about 4 similarly mutilated bricks around the base.  This was particularly tedious work.

Here's how it fit's against the column base

exterior stairs, now complete

Work on the pavers begins.  This is a herringbone pattern, with a 'norman' size brick, which makes the pattern a little more pronounced.

Pavers again, with the stair in the background.  The wood-fired boiler will go in the niche to the left of the stairs.  We needed a heat dump, for excess heat from the boiler, if it's not called for inside, so we ran radiant pipes in the bench against the stairs.  This should be a cozy seating area in the late fall / early spring.

Looking back toward the entry

And down toward the spillway terrace

Another stair, with our new dog, Thelma, in the foreground.

This is the spillway terrace.  It doesn't make sense yet, but eventually we'll have a dam across the creek and the spillway will flow right past this terrace.

Okay, so I liked this stair.  Sorry for the redundancy.

That's John, grouting the joints.  The pavers were first laid in a mortar bed, allowed to set and then grouted, much like tile.  This is because the brick we used is very dense and has a low initial rate of absorption (IRA), compared to the typical southern red brick that our masons were accustomed to.